Dollygirl asked about the shaders I use for my entry, so here is the story.
I wanted to do something quick so I went with a grey scale render, no colour and no textures except for the text bubble. I started with the deafult Shader Mixer Presets Orange Toon shader with the Value colour set to white.
After some testing I decided that the Toon Outline brick was a bit boring and replaced it with a Velvet brick and a Mix brick to invert the output from the Velvet brick. (The 800 pixel restriction makes it pointless to post Shader Mixer recipes, you can not read them if they are scaled down.So I have put up the recipes at Photobucket.) http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y212/Oom_Fooyat/DAZ3D/toon1.jpg
If you render a scene using this shader it will probably look like the first render below. The “secret” to get the nice, crisp b&w render is in two settings in the Advanced section of the Render Settings. Increase Gain to 2 and decrees Gamma to 0.1 and the grey is gone (see pic 2). Then adjust the lights till you get the result you want.
As I used the same shader in most of the scene I got very little contrast at places. The woman for instance has almost no detail, see pic 3 below. To fix that I used another simple trick, I inserted a Mix brick to invert the shader. http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y212/Oom_Fooyat/DAZ3D/toon2.jpg The gils dress is the same shader but with different values in the three grey shades
Inverting shaders can give nice effects, the sidewalk and the wall, for instance, are the same shader only one is inverted.
This will be fun but I AM going to miss the sketch engine in Poser
Why will you miss it? You can use Poser if you want. DS has a basic comic render mode as far as I know, but I don’t know if it has the options to do the sketch type effect that you mean. I have never tried it. I have pwToon for DS, but I don’t know if it works in DS4. I think a lot of things haven’t been updated for DS4. Still, as I said, you can use Poser. The sketch engine isn’t a paid add-on, is it?
This will be fun but I AM going to miss the sketch engine in Poser
Why will you miss it? You can use Poser if you want. DS has a basic comic render mode as far as I know, but I don’t know if it has the options to do the sketch type effect that you mean. I have never tried it. I have pwToon for DS, but I don’t know if it works in DS4. I think a lot of things haven’t been updated for DS4. Still, as I said, you can use Poser. The sketch engine isn’t a paid add-on, is it?
Dana
I can not use Poser because I don’t have it. I used to have access to Poser long time ago and I loved the sketch render option. There is nothing close to it in DS. Actually I have never seen anything like it any where else.
There was a major revamp of Shader Mixer with DS4 and some shaders from older versions will not work.
Ohh so sorry LG! But maybe you will be “Da Man”. The creator of the best Bryce Materials for Toon shading in the world! You are pretty handy. I was all set to see your pretty little SuperGirl show up too.
But you know, now that we know you are a comic buff and tried your hand at pen and pencil I want to see!
Lonnie
chohole has some feelers out over in the Bryce forum, so we’ll see what she can turn up. As to my comics background, I’ve sold maybe 3 major collections over the last 30 or so years and still have a sizable one stashed away. I stopped freelancing art around 10 years ago (about the time I discovered 3D art) and haven’t done a complete piece in years! I did mostly role-playing games art and a few comic strips and made a pretty good living at it for a while. Alas, real life and bills moved on me faster than my commissions (and a general collapse in the markets around 2000-2001) so I pretty much quit the business. I have no idea if any of my work survives on line anymore (probably not) and my scanner bit the dust years ago, so people will just have to suffer through my 3D work instead. Still, I’m sufficiently intrigued by this month’s challenge to see what I can come up with given my limitations. It’s early yet, so we’ll see…
Whooo…hold everything. It is just now the 1st and going on four pages already?
As you know, or maybe don’t know, I announced a while back that each month there would be a featured freebie giver. Each entry will have to have at least one freebie by that person to qualify. Last month was Trumarcar.
This month will be Adam Thwaites from most-digital-creations.com. You must have a freebie by him to qualify for entry. I will announce who it will be each month, or the host can ask me before posting their intros. (next month will be HoboBo).
Dolly Girl asked about the shaders I use for my entry, so here is the story.
I wanted to do something quick so I went with a grey scale render, no colour and no textures except for the text bubble. I started with the deafult Shader Mixer Presets Orange Toon shader with the Value colour set to white.
....
Cheers! Oom
Thank you Oom. I am going to play with the receipe. A nice write up of how to create and use the basic toon shader.
Lonnie
Ohh so sorry LG! But maybe you will be “Da Man”. The creator of the best Bryce Materials for Toon shading in the world! You are pretty handy. I was all set to see your pretty little SuperGirl show up too.
But you know, now that we know you are a comic buff and tried your hand at pen and pencil I want to see!
Lonnie
chohole has some feelers out over in the Bryce forum, so we’ll see what she can turn up. As to my comics background, I’ve sold maybe 3 major collections over the last 30 or so years and still have a sizable one stashed away. I stopped freelancing art around 10 years ago (about the time I discovered 3D art) and haven’t done a complete piece in years! I did mostly role-playing games art and a few comic strips and made a pretty good living at it for a while. Alas, real life and bills moved on me faster than my commissions (and a general collapse in the markets around 2000-2001) so I pretty much quit the business. I have no idea if any of my work survives on line anymore (probably not) and my scanner bit the dust years ago, so people will just have to suffer through my 3D work instead. Still, I’m sufficiently intrigued by this month’s challenge to see what I can come up with given my limitations. It’s early yet, so we’ll see…
You know this explains many things to me at least. Thanks for sharing your story. Me I didn’t start out as an artist. I was aiming for the stars literally. So I went the engineer route. I didn’t make it but maybe my son will. He is getting his masters in engineering now and he wants to go work for SpaceX.
Whooo…hold everything. It is just now the 1st and going on four pages already?
As you know, or maybe don’t know, I announced a while back that each month there would be a featured freebie giver. Each entry will have to have at least one freebie by that person to qualify. Last month was Trumarcar.
This month will be Adam Thwaites from most-digital-creations.com. You must have a freebie by him to qualify for entry. I will announce who it will be each month, or the host can ask me before posting their intros. (next month will be HoboBo).
Whooo…hold everything. It is just now the 1st and going on four pages already?
As you know, or maybe don’t know, I announced a while back that each month there would be a featured freebie giver. Each entry will have to have at least one freebie by that person to qualify. Last month was Trumarcar.
This month will be Adam Thwaites from most-digital-creations.com. You must have a freebie by him to qualify for entry. I will announce who it will be each month, or the host can ask me before posting their intros. (next month will be HoboBo).
Whooo…hold everything. It is just now the 1st and going on four pages already?
As you know, or maybe don’t know, I announced a while back that each month there would be a featured freebie giver. Each entry will have to have at least one freebie by that person to qualify. Last month was Trumarcar.
This month will be Adam Thwaites from most-digital-creations.com. You must have a freebie by him to qualify for entry. I will announce who it will be each month, or the host can ask me before posting their intros. (next month will be HoboBo).
So, with that said…good luck to all who enter.
Well let us hope we can keep the ball rolling.
what ball ?
That would be the great big ball of fun, bigh. Nah, not really l am kidding. I just meant that we keep progressing towards our goal of having a good time and see great renders for the month.
Lonnie
Aargh - I’m having trouble with the toon shaders! I suspect this is because of the age of my computer (still running XP - it’s that old). However, I get a completely unbudgeted paycheck on Wednesday, and all my bills are paid, so it looks like it’s new computer time. Hope I’ll have my content loaded before the end of the month…
It shouldn’t be a matter of OS: all of my available shaders, and even the early setup for the Mephistopolis project (teasers to follow) were made in XP. Unfortunately, my earlier Noir-Toon shaders will not work in DS4 unless you set them up in DS2 or DS3 and import the scene. But any toon/sketch/art-style shader is accepted. Just remember that commercial ones (“Visual Style” for instance) count as paid items.
But maybe you will be “Da Man”. The creator of the best Bryce Materials for Toon shading in the world! You are pretty handy. I was all set to see your pretty little SuperGirl show up too. 
